The Story of AskGamblers

It all started back in 2005. I was a law student, renting an apartment with my roommate and living a typical student life. Designer by nature, I was constantly looking for creative jobs in IT and mostly finding web design gigs. Back then, finding freelance work wasn't easy and even when I did, these jobs weren’t paid well.

One evening I noticed my roommate got all dressed up, in a fancy white shirt and black pants. He looked funny in it. He looked like a waiter, or a bartender. In fact, he just became one; he got a bartending job in a newly opened, fancy casino. Back then, I knew nothing about casinos, nor did any of my friends. My roommate was my first connection to this industry.

Weeks went by and my roommate kept telling me about his new job and its pretty decent salary. After thinking about it, I decided to try and get a job at that casino, so I could make some extra money too. The only open position was a bartending night shift. I was not confident in my bartending skills since I’ve never done anything similar before, but I needed the money and I was pretty sure I would learn everything quickly.

From the moment I started, I could tell I was gonna be the worst bartender ever. I was right. I was the worst bartender in the world. I had no clue about different kinds of drinks, so one time I served an expensive cognac with ice, thinking it’s the same as whiskey. I would fall asleep at the bar whenever it wasn’t busy and naturally they would see it on the cameras. One time I was caught at the bar doing my freelance web design stuff. After only 20 days on the job, I decided this was definitely not for me. I decided to quit.

As I was leaving my night shift, I saw one of the bosses drinking his morning coffee in the downstairs casino lobby. He had heard the story about the new guy, caught with his laptop at the bar and he asked me what was that all about, and if knew anything about building websites. I knew some web design and they needed someone to build a website for their business so they could move into the online space. Completely unexpected thing happened: instead of quitting, I got offered a promotion at their Headquarters.

When I stepped into their amazing HQ, with hundreds of computer and TV screens and busy employees running around, my first impression was overwhelming. I felt I belonged there, certainly not in the bar. I had my own desk, a new laptop and I started learning everything about the world of online gambling.

This was a whole new, unexplored space for me, so I spent my days and nights researching about online casinos, games, online marketing etc. I felt that combining my design skills with huge resources this company had, would make us the best business in that space.

Being curious and entrepreneurial by nature, I started discovering things I was sure I could easily do on my own. I saw many popular websites that promoted casinos and I was 100% confident I could do it better, using my skills, experience and the knowledge I gathered working in this specific company.

I started building my own website, mostly focusing on design, since that was my most valuable skill. Few weeks later, I launched AskGamblers.

Launching AskGamblers

On the day of the launch I didn’t expect much. I knew no one had heard about it. That was the time before Facebook, Twitter and other popular social media to help us gain initial traffic and buzz. So how did it start?

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Now, looking back, I’m not even sure how did we make it work without all these services available today. It was damn hard to get that first visitor and then each single one after that. It was going so slow, without funding, online media or anything like that. Now, knowing how slow it went back then and knowing the possibilities I have today, I’m sure the AG launch would go much differently.

I was obsessing about every single detail of the website, every single pixel had to be in its place, there was no room for mistakes. I always thought I can make it even better, so I kept changing and improving things all the time. I didn’t have enough money to pay the people to work for me so I had volunteers, well mostly my friends who helped me add new content, search and update information etc.

Limitations

This industry celebrates gamblers, as they are at its core. By playing casino games, you get the best experience and insight about this industry, far better than any you can get from a book, blog or an online forum. I never gambled, I was never, whatsoever, interested in gambling. All that I now know about gambling I have learned from running this business over the years. I never gambled.

Another limitation I always felt was a language barrier. My English is pretty good, but I was still never able to write official articles, blog posts, reviews or anything of that sort. I always had to hire a native english speaker to do that for me.

Even with these limitations, I had a clear vision of what I wanted to build and nothing ever seemed impossible.

Clutter

Naturally, we wanted to have the best website and have all the casinos in the world in one place. When that wasn’t enough, we wanted to expand to include other game types such as poker, sportsbook, bingo, lottery, backgammon, skill games etc. After a year working on all this, it still wasn’t enough. We decided to include other languages, so we found translators around the world to translate dozens of thousand of pages for over a year.

At one point we had so much information it became a huge hassle to control and update. All these different websites were changing rapidly, so we constantly had to track these changes and keep our content updated. This could have been done only with at least another dozen of people to manage this content. Updating the old content was a huge amount of work that kept us from putting up the new content. This strategy didn’t work out since our database became too complicated and our staff overwhelmed. We had to make some changes.

The option was to continue and pursue to have the entire online gambling content on our website, or focus on something more specific. After a detailed market research we discovered that AskGamblers is recognized the most as a casino portal and we took this as a clear sign to shift our focus to that specific segment. We ended up cutting out around 80% of our entire web content. It may seem as a big sacrifice or waste, but in reality it was the best decision we could have possibly made.

We did what was necessary at a given moment, and this is another important lesson we have learned through our experience.

Fair Play

As a well known casino portal we still wanted to differentiate ourselves from other portals and set a standard for others in this business. Our portal has pretty much everything you need to know about casinos. We offer outstanding casino reviews, newest bonuses and promotions, hottest news, author blogs, forums, all types of casino games, automated casino complaints system, casino newsletters and much more.

After all these years in the gambling industry, I recognized that the most appreciated service we could offer to the players is trustworthiness. Sketchy casinos are quickly recognized by the players and never last long. I wanted to focus all our efforts and resources into promoting trustworthiness inside gambling industry. This became our mission.

Few years ago, we built a free automated complaints system where we help players resolve their disputes with casinos. These disputes are usually about difficulties in paying out players’ winnings. To this day, we have helped thousands of players get a total of couple million dollars in unpaid winnings. This turned out to have a huge impact on the industry.

Alongside complaints, we're constantly trying to recognize reputable and spot rogue casinos so we could warn our players before they start to play. All the information we’ve collected over the years, through our complaint system or user reviews is transparent and it gives the best, most accurate insight about each casino. Having this amount of information allowed us to create our own, unique and trusted algorithm we call Casino Rank.

We're always working hard to keep our reputation intact and stay the casino portal that promotes trustworthiness among casinos. We will always fight for the fair play and truth. Our motto sums up perfectly what we stand for:

Get the truth. Then play.

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